The History of Woman Suffrage Volume II Part 138

WOMAN SUFFRAGE ABOVE HUMAN LAW.

LETTER FROM GERRIT SMITH.

PETERBORO, August 15, 1873

SUSAN B. ANTHONY--DEAR FRIEND: I have your letter. So you have not paid your fine; are not able to pay it; and are not willing to pay it!

I send you herein the money to pay it. If you shall still decline doing so, then use the money at your own discretion, to promote the cause of woman suffrage.

I trust that you feel kindly toward Judge Hunt. He is an honest man and an able judge. He would oppress no person--emphatically, no woman.

It was a light fine that he imposed upon you. Moreover, he did not require you to be imprisoned until it was paid. In taking your case out of the bands of the jury, he did what he believed he had a perfect right to do; and what [HAND] provided there was no fact to be pa.s.sed upon) he had precedents for doing. And yet Judge Hunt erred--erred as, but too probably, every other judge would, in like circ.u.mstances, have erred. At the hazard of being called, for the ten thousandth time, a visionary and a fanatic for holding opinions which, though they will be entirely welcome to the more enlightened future sense of men, are as entirely repugnant to their present sense, I venture to say that the Judge erred in allowing himself to look into the Const.i.tution. Indeed, yours was a case that neither called for nor permitted the opening of any law-book whatever. You have not forgotten how frequently, in the days of slavery, the Const.i.tution was quoted in behalf of the abomination. As if that paper had been drawn up and agreed upon by both the blacks and the whites, instead of the whites only; and as if slavery protected the rights of the slave instead of annihilating them. I thank G.o.d that I was withheld from the great folly and great sin of acknowledging a law for slavery--a law for any piracy--least of all for the superlative piracy. Nor have you forgotten how incessantly, in the late war, our enemies, Northern as well as Southern, were calling for this observance of the Const.i.tution. As if the purpose of that paper was to serve those whose parricidal hands were at the throat of our Nation. I recall but one instance in which I was ever reconciled to profanity. It was when, during the war, I was witnessing a heated conversation between a patriotic Republican and a rabid secession Democrat. The Republican was arguing that the Government should put forth all its powers to suppress the rebellion. At this stage the Democrat thrust in the stereotyped rebel phrase: "but only according to the Const.i.tution."

This interruption provoked the Republican to exclaim, as he hurried on, "d.a.m.n the Const.i.tution!" The oath so happily helped to express my own feeling that I had no more heart to censure it than the recording angel had to preserve the record of Uncle Toby's famous oath.

And now, in your case, is another wrongful use of the Const.i.tution.

The instrument is cited against woman, as if she had united with man in making it, and was, therefore, morally bound by the flagrant usurpation, and legally concluded by it. Moreover, an excuse for turning the Const.i.tution against her is that doing so deprives her of nothing but the pastime of dropping in a box a little piece of paper.

Nevertheless, this dropping, inasmuch as it expresses her choice of the guardians of her person and property, is her great natural right to provide for the safety of her life and of the means to sustain it.

She has no rights whatever, and she lives upon mere privileges and favors, if others may usurp her rights. In fact she lies at the mercy of men, if men only may choose into whose hands to put the control of her person and property.... I do not complain of Judge Hunt's interpretations of the Const.i.tution on the suffrage question. I do not complain of his refusing to accept the const.i.tutional recognition of woman's right to vote, though that right seems to lie on the very surface of the Const.i.tution amongst her rights of citizenship. Nor do I complain of his pa.s.sing by this recognition to dig down into the Const.i.tution for proofs of there being two kinds of citizens--one that can vote and one that can not vote. What I complain of is that he did not hold as void, instead of arguing them to be valid, any words in the instrument which seemed to him to favor the disfranchis.e.m.e.nt of woman and consequent robbery and destruction of her rights. What I complain of is that, instead of his conscientious regard for his oath, he was not prepared to ignore and scout all human law so far as it is antagonistic to natural law and natural rights....

How striking and instructive is the following extract from a speech made a year or two ago in the Spanish Parliament: "Natural rights dwell essentially in the individual, and are derived directly from his own moral nature. They are therefore, so to speak, unlegislatable, since they do not arise from the law, do not depend on the law, and, not depending on the law, can not be abrogated by the law. Born of the organic const.i.tution of the individual, with the individual they live and die, unless a tyrannical, unrighteous, and iniquitous law tears them from him, and then he will have the right to protest forever against this wrong and the iniquity of the law, and to rise against it whenever he can. Well, my lords, the inalienable rights of the Cubans have been torn from them by unrighteous, tyrannical, and iniquitous laws." Would that Judge Hunt and all our judges might, ere long, take the ground of this sublimely eloquent Spaniard, that natural rights are "unlegislatable".... Would that my much esteemed friend, Judge Hunt, had so far outgrown bad law and grown into good law, as to have p.r.o.nounced at your trial the disenthralment of woman, and thus have set the name of Hunt in immortality by the side of the names of Brougham and Mansfield, and others who have had the wisdom and the courage to thrust aside false paper law and install in its place that sovereign law which is written upon the heart and upon the very foundations of human being! He does not doubt that they did right. He honors them for having done as they did. Nor can he doubt that to deny to woman all part in the making and executing of laws under which her life and property may be taken from her is a crime against her, which no paper law can sanction and which G.o.d's law must condemn.... This worship of the Const.i.tution!--how blinding and belittling! I would that every judge who tends to this weakness (and nearly every judge, yes, and nearly every other person tends to it) might find his steps arrested by the warning example of Daniel Webster. This pre-eminently intellectual man, whom nature had fitted to soar in the high sphere of absolute and everlasting law, had so shrivelled his soul by his worship of the Const.i.tution that he came, at last, to desire no other inscription on his grave-stone than his shameless confession of such base worship. And all this, notwithstanding the Const.i.tution was, in his eye, the great bulwark of slavery!

Be of good courage and good cheer, my brave and faithful sister! I trust our country is on the eve of great and blessed changes.... Best of all, the ballot can not much longer be withheld from woman. Men are fast coming to see that it belongs to her as fully as to themselves, and that the country is in perishing need of her wielding it. If the silly portion of our ladies will but cease from their silly apprehension that the plan is to _make_ them vote whether they will or no, and also cease from their ignorant and childish admissions that they already have all the rights they want--then will the American women quickly be enfranchised, and their nation will rapidly achieve a far higher civilization than it is possible for any nation to arrive at which is guilty of the folly and the sin of clothing man with all political power and reducing women to a political cipher.

Cordially yours, GERRIT SMITH.

WASHINGTON NOTES.

BY GRACE GREENWOOD.

When I said that in the dull languor of our summer collapse we felt none of your fierce Northern excitements, I should have excepted the Anthony suffrage case. That touched nearly if not deeply. The ark of the holy political covenant resting here--the sacred mules that draw it being stabled in the Capitol for half a year at a time--the woman who has laid unsanctified hands upon it, is naturally regarded with peculiar horror. I did not take exception to the _Times'_ article of June 19th on this case. It was mild and courteous in tone, and the view taken of the XIV. Amendment plea seems to me the only sound one.

I certainly do not want to get into your political preserves by any quibble or dodge. I want my right there freely granted and guaranteed, and will be politely treated when I come, or I won't stay. The promised land of justice and equality is not to be reached by a short cut. I fear we have a large part of the forty years of struggle and zigzaging before us yet. I am pretty sure our Moses has not appeared.

I think he will be a woman. Often the way seems dark, as well as long, when I see so much fooling with the great question of woman's claims to equal educational advantages with men; to just remuneration for good work, especially in teaching, and fair credit for her share in the patriotic and benevolent enterprises of the age. I do not say that equal pay for equal services will never be accorded to woman, even in the civil service, till she has the ballot to back her demand; but that is the private opinion of many high Government officials. I do not say that woman's right to be represented, as well as taxed, will never be recognized as a logical practical result of the democratic principle till the Democrats come in power. But it may be so. The Gospel was first offered to the Jews, but first accepted by the Gentiles.

In your article, fair as it was in spirit, you failed to touch upon two points which struck me rather painfully. It seems that Judge Hunt, after p.r.o.nouncing a learned, and, I suppose, a sound opinion, peremptorily ordered the jury to bring the defendant in guilty. Now, could not twelve honest, intelligent jurymen be trusted to defend their birthright against one woman? Why such zeal, such more than Roman sternness? Again, in the trial of the inspectors of election, why were both judge and jurymen so merciful? No verdict of guilty was ordered, and the council of twelve who had seen fit to punish Miss Anthony by a fine of $100 and costs, merely mulcted in the modest sum of $25, each defenseless defendant sinning against light. Was it that they considered in their manly clemency the fact that women have superior facilities for earning money, or did they give heed to the old, old excuse, "The woman tempted me, and I did register"?

It surely is strange that such severe penalties should be visited on a woman, for a first and only indiscretion in the suffrage line, when a man may rise up on election morning and go forth, voting and to vote.

If he be of an excitable and mercurial nature, one of the sort of citizens which sweet Ireland empties on us by the county, he may sportively flit about among the polls, from ward to ward, of the metropolis, and no man says to him nay; he may even travel hilariously from city to city, with free pa.s.ses and free drinks--who treats Miss Anthony?--making festive calls, and dropping ballots for cards, and no disturbance comes of it--he is neither fined nor confined. So, it would seem, "a little voting is a dangerous thing."

Say what you will, the whole question of woman's status in the State and the Church, in society and the family, is full of absurd contradictions and monstrous anomalies. We are so responsible, yet irresponsible--we are idols, we are idiots--we are everything, we are nothing. We are the Caryatides, rearing up the entablature of the temple of liberty we are never allowed to enter. We may plot against a government, and hang for it; but if we help to found and sustain a government by patriotic effort and devotion, by toil and hardship, by courage, loyalty, and faith, by the sacrifice of those nearest and dearest to us, and then venture to clutch at the crumbs that fall from the table where our Masters Jonathan, Patrick, Hans, and Sambo sit at feast, you arrest us, imprison us, try us, fine us, and then add injury to insult, by calling us old, ugly, and fanatical.

One is forcibly reminded of the sermon of the colored brother on woman, the heads of which discourse were: "Firstly. What am woman?

Secondly. Whar did she come from? Thirdly. Who does she belong to?

Fourthly. Which way am she gwine to?"

The law and the Gospel have settled the "secondly" and "thirdly."

Woman came from man, and belongs to him by the mortgage he holds on her through that spare-rib; but "firstly" and "fourthly" remain as profound and unsolvable questions as they were before the Ethiopian divine wrestled with them. But perhaps this troublous and perplexed existence is our "be-all and end-all"; that in the life beyond, man may foreclose that old mortgage and re-absorb woman into his glorified and all-sufficient being.

I have never believed with Miss Anthony, that the XIV. Amendment was going to help us. I have never accepted certain other of her theories; but I believe in and accept her as a woman of intense convictions, of high courage and constancy; and I don't like to hear her ridiculed and abused. If anything can make me think meanly of my young brothers of the press, it is the way they pelt and pester Susan B. Anthony. For shame, boys! Never a one of you will make the man she is. Even some of our Washington editors turn aside from the fair game. Providence, in its inscrutable wisdom, has provided for them in the Board of Public Works, to vent their virtuous indignation and manly scorn of the woman they are determined shall stand in perpetual pillory in the market-place of this great, free Republic.--_New York Times_.

The Washington, D. C., _Star_ says of Judge Hunt's opinion: "If his views are to prevail, of what effect are the suffrage amendments to the Federal Const.i.tution."

[_The County Post_, Washington Co., N. Y., Friday, June 27, 1873].

NOT A VOTER.

The United States Courts have p.r.o.nounced on Miss Anthony's case, which she so adroitly made by voting last fall, in company with fourteen others of her s.e.x. The decision was adverse to the claim made by this devoted friend of female suffrage, that as the Const.i.tution now stood, women had a right to vote. Accordingly the indomitable old lady was found guilty of violating the law regulating the purity of the ballot-box, and fined one hundred dollars and costs. A good many journals seem to regard this as a good joke on Susan B, as they call her, and make it the excuse for more poor jokes of their own. It may be stupid to confess it, but we can not see where the laugh comes in.

If it is a mere question of who has got the best of it, Miss Anthony is still ahead; she has voted, and the American Const.i.tution has survived the shock. Fining her one hundred dollars does not rub out that fact that fourteen women voted, and went home, and the world jogged on as before. The decision of the judge does not prove that it is wrong for women to vote, it does not even prove that Miss Anthony did wrong in voting. It only shows that one judge on the bench differs in opinion from other equally well qualified judges off the bench. It is not our province to find fault with this decision of the United States Court at Rochester. Miss Anthony may be wrong in attempting to vote; of that we are not certain. But of the greater question back of it, of Miss Anthony's inherent right to vote we have no question, and that after all is the more important matter. This Rochester breakwater may d.a.m.n back the stream for a while, but it is bound to come, sweeping away all barriers. The opposition to extending the suffrage to the other s.e.x is founded alone on prejudice arising from social custom. Reason and logic are both against it. Women will not be voters possibly for some years to come; it is not desirable that the franchise should come too quick; but they are certain to have the full privilege of citizenship in the end.

[_The Age_, Thursday, July 31, 1873.]

KU-KLUX PRISONERS.

The Ku-Klux prisoners are, it seems, now to be released. They are persons some of whom had committed a.s.saults and other offenses cognizable by the laws of the States where they lived, and the Ku-Klux legislation by Congress was a political device as unnecessary as it was unconst.i.tutional. Perhaps the most ridiculous, as well as the most unjust prosecution under the Ku-Klux law was that inst.i.tuted against Miss Anthony for voting in Rochester. Under her view of her rights, she presented herself at the polls, and submitted her claims to the proper officers, who decided that she had a right to vote. She practiced no fraud or concealment of any kind. She did what every good citizen here would do, if any doubt arose from a.s.sessment, registration, or residence, as to his right to vote. He would state the case to the election officers, and abide their decision. Yet this, we are told, is a criminal offense under the Ku-Klux law, for which a citizen who has done exactly what he ought to have done, may be fined and imprisoned as a criminal. Nay, if, as often happens, a point of doubt is submitted to our Court of Common Pleas and decided in favor of the applicant, he is still liable to criminal prosecution under the Federal Ku-Klux law, if a United States Commissioner or Judge differs from the State Judge in the construction of the State law. Since the victims of the Ku-Klux act are now receiving pardons, we hope the fine of $100 unlawfully imposed on Miss Anthony may be remitted. We do not think there was a case of more gross injustice ever practiced under forms of law, than the conviction of that lady for a criminal offense in voting, with the a.s.sent of the legal election officers to whom her right was submitted. If all the victims of this unconst.i.tutional law were as innocent as she was, they can not be too soon released. Even those who were guilty of offenses cognizable by the State law, were unjustly tried and condemned under an unconst.i.tutional statute pa.s.sed for political effect.

[From the Philadelphia _Age_].

THE FUNNY CASE OF MISS ANTHONY.

The case of Miss Susan B. Anthony seems to be dismissed with a laugh by most of the press; but from the first inst.i.tution of a prosecution against her under the Ku-Klux law, we have regarded the proceeding as one in which the injustice was not cloaked by the absurdity. The law was pa.s.sed by Congress on a political cry that ma.s.sacre and outrage menaced negroes at the polls in the Southern States, and now we have it used to oppress a woman in Rochester, New York. We are not debarred from saying "oppressed" because the judge left the fine to be levied on her property instead of imprisoning her person--in a State in which women have, we suppose, long been exempt from imprisonment for debt.

But the chief outrage in the case is that it affords the first case, we believe, in the United States, or anywhere in modern times, of a conviction for a crime when there was no criminal intent. The proof, or the presumption of this, is essential to a crime in the criminal law of every civilized nation. The case of Miss Anthony was that of a lady who believed that the much vaunted amendments of the Federal Const.i.tution extended to white women; and many lawyers and Congressmen have also avowed this opinion. We do not hold it, but we do not doubt that Miss Anthony does, very sincerely. We think as the Judge says in her case, that the Federal Const.i.tution has nothing to do with the matter; that is wholly regulated by the Const.i.tution of New York. But every word of his argument was equally strong to show that he, a Federal Judge, had nothing to do with the matter, and that it wholly belonged to the courts of New York. They know, we presume, no law that can create a crime without a criminal intention, and we deny the right of Congress or any earthly authority to pa.s.s so monstrous a law. Every day in criminal courts that point arises. If a man charged with larceny is proved to have taken the goods of another, but under some idea that he had a right to them, no matter how erroneous, the criminal prosecution is instantly dismissed. Our eminent jurist, Judge King, used to say: "This is a civil suit run mad." Has any citizen of Philadelphia supposed that if there is a doubt as to his right to vote--one of those numerous doubts that arise in changes of residence, time of registration, naturalization, etc.--and wishing scrupulously to do right, he go to the window and fully and fairly state his case, and the election officers consider it, and adjudge that he should vote then and there, has any citizen heretofore known that he thus became liable to conviction for a crime under the Ku-Klux laws, if some judge of a court should think the election officers decided the point erroneously?

Yet that is the doctrine of Miss Anthony's case. Her garb and person sufficed to tell she was a woman when she approached the polls, and there was also argument over the matter, exhibiting afresh the fact notorious at her home, that she claimed a lawful right to vote under certain amendments of the Const.i.tution. She was no repeater or false personator, or probably she would not be persecuted, and certainly she would be pardoned.

She submitted her right to the election officers, and they, the judges appointed by the law, decided in her favor. It is just the case we have supposed in Philadelphia, and which often really occurs here, and may occur anywhere. And now we are told the Ku-Klux law makes this. .h.i.therto laudable and innocent mode of procedure a crime, punishable with fine and imprisonment! This is the decision over which many journals are laughing because the first victim is a woman. We can not see the joke.

[Chicago _Evening Journal_, Dec. 1, 1874].

Mrs. Myra Bradwell, the editor and publisher of the _Legal News_, of this city, is a warm advocate of woman's rights. In the last number of the _News_, speaking of Susan B. Anthony, she declares that Judge Ward Hunt, of the Federal bench, "violated the Const.i.tution of the United States more, to convict her of illegal voting, than she did in voting, for he had sworn to support it, she had not."

Sister Myra is evidently not afraid of being hauled up for contempt of court.

[St. Louis _Daily Globe_, Thursday, June 26, 1873].

MISS ANTHONY'S CASE.

JUDGE HUNT'S DECISION REVIEWED--SHE HAD A RIGHT TO A JURY TRIAL.

_Editor of St. Louis Globe_:--I ask the favor of a small s.p.a.ce in your paper to notice the very remarkable decision of Judge Hunt, in the case of the United States _vs._ Susan B. Anthony.

The Judge tells us "that the right of voting, or the privilege of voting, is a right or privilege arising under the const.i.tution of the States, and not of the united States. If the right belongs to any particular person, it is because such person is ent.i.tled to it as a citizen of the State where he offers to exercise it, and not because of citizenship of the United States."

If this position be true (which I do not admit), then Judge Hunt should have p.r.o.nounced the act of Congress unconst.i.tutional, and dismissed the case for want of jurisdiction. If the matter belongs exclusively to the States, then the United States have nothing to do with it, and clearly have no right to interfere and punish a person for the (supposed) violation of a State law. But this is one of the least of the criticisms to which this opinion is exposed. A far graver one consists in the fact that the defendant was denied the right of a trial by jury.

The Supreme Court of the United States say: "Another guarantee of freedom was broken when Milligan was denied a trial by jury. The great minds of the country have differed on the correct interpretation to be given to various provisions of the Federal Const.i.tution, and judicial decision has been often invoked to settle their true meaning; but, until recently, no one ever doubted that the right of trial by jury was fortified in the organic law against the power of attack. It is now a.s.sailed; but if ideas can be expressed in words, and language has any meaning, this right--one of the most valuable in a free country--is preserved to every one accused of crime, who is not attached to the army, or navy, or militia in actual service. The VI.

Amendment affirms that in 'all criminal prosecutions the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury,'